Just 30 Seconds of Your Time

Many internet plays died off in the 1999-2001 time frame because they made one erroneous assumption.  They assumed that users would change their daily routine and behavior in order to use their service or product. Many had phrases in their pitches like “all a user needs to do is take 30 seconds a day to…”. Guess what? People don’t like change, even if for only 30 seconds. I posted recently about Carl Ledbetter’s speech that defined successful technology as being technology that was invisible and simple for the user.

Consumers want solutions that allow them to maintain their daily routines while working seamlessly in the background. Voice over IP is a classic example. Initially, the technology failed to take off because voice quality was poor. Latency issues along with dropped packets resulted in broken or tinny conversations. Improved compression technologies along with greater bandwidth solved the quality issues. However, it still did not take off in the mainstream. People were not used to using their computers to make calls. They viewed computers for data and phones for voice. Vonage (and the other leading VoIP service providers) saw this and rolled out a model where users plugged a voice gateway into their internet hub and then plugged their phones in the gateway. Suddenly, the technology became a) simple to install and b) invisible to the user. They can continue to make calls like they always have with their phones, and Vonage has over 1 million customers.

Consumer plays often fail because they assume the consumer will change behavior if the benefit is large enough. The problem is that few consumer technologies address large enough issues to warrant mass behavior change. People also get uneasy when you make them interact with their technologies in new ways. Don’t make someone use a computer, for example, when they can still use a phone to make a VoIP call. Don’t try to change their mental construct about how they use technology.

Enterprise plays often fail because they try to not only change behavior, but to disintermediate users from their established routines and relationships. People have come to trust and rely on their friendly brokers and don’t look kindly on “automating” them away. Internal parties view new solutions suspiciously. These technologies often have “soft” benefits such as increased productivity or reduced headcount. This often means, to IT or procurement, that they will have fewer people in their empire. The discomfort of change is real and hard while the benefits are TBD.

Simple suggestions:
1) hide behind common interfaces and routines
2) find similar, accepted analogs and draft behind them
3) don’t dramatically change how people view the role of technology in their lives
4) listen to your gut about adoption issues…make it pass the grandmother test
5) KISS: keep it as simple as possible

Comments

[Stephen Bluestein]

Matt,

I completely agree with your point. The Segway is also a good example of a product the inventors thought would change the way people commute. They assumed the benefit was large enough to transform people's walking habits into segway use.

Stephen Bluestein
PS. We met back when I was at Kellogg last year. I was working with Chad Mirkin on NanoCore during the Kellogg Business Plan competition.

[mbmccall]

Great example. Good to hear from you. :)

[Vineeth Subramanyam]

Matt --
Great post -- people certainly don’t want to change their behavior. I think this idea should serve as a reminder to every product/service development process as well. A common characteristic in solutions that have become tremendously successful is that they expertly and proactively pinpoint people’s burning needs and provide the most relevant, the timeliest, the fastest and the easiest solution – all without the need for customer intervention.

Three examples immediately came to mind. First, Gmail’s proposition of a perpetually growing haystack in which needles could be readily found by running a simple search saved tremendous time otherwise spent on organizing, foldering and deleting emails. Second, Riya is taking a similar crack at image search to obviate the need for repeated tagging of photographs. Third, the recent suite of simple features on LinkedIn eliminates unnecessary work to find classmates and colleagues – and is undoubtedly helping them to grow their account base.

Regardless of the nature of the solution, revolutionary or not, people don’t want to spend the extra time, and the solutions that are most successful are adept at accurately guessing people’s needs, even if they themselves are not yet aware of these needs!